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Flesherton pharmacist makes changes after robbery

Flesherton Pharmacy owner John Davies in Flesherton, Ont. has had to make changes at the pharmacy following a recent daylight armed robbery of narcotics. (James Masters/The Owen Sound Sun Times/Postmedia Network)

After an armed robber wearing a balaclava and gloves walked into Flesherton Pharmacy on Nov. 18 and made off with narcotics, pharmacy owner John Davies decided he had to do something.

Three staff were in the store when the robber entered around closing time and passed a note to them demanding drugs. The next day, two particularly shaken staff members saw a crisis counsellor whom Davies hired to help them.

The next day he read a front-page story in a Toronto newspaper about people who buy guns who turn around and sell them to criminals. Another story in the same edition was about a conference on what was termed a national opioid crisis.

Davies thinks it's more dangerous for pharmacies now because more are addicted to narcotics combined with apparently easy firearms access.

“I mean, I've run that business for 30 years and I've never seen anything like this. It's sort of a change.”

Grey County OPP Const. Alina Grelik said Wednesday that police continue to investigate the robbery.

The culprit's getaway pickup truck was found later the day of the robbery, destroyed by fire in South Bruce. Police have said it was used to steal fuel from Fox Harley-Davidson south of Owen Sound the same day as the Flesherton robbery. The truck was stolen from Blythe four days earlier.

Davies is installing security cameras, though he notes the robber's identity was disguised in this case, and he has decided not to carry much narcotic medication in his pharmacy. He hopes publicizing that fact will help deter others from trying to rob it again but he has little control over what might happen.

“I'm really racking my brain trying to think how do I make this store safer,” he said. Flesherton is a small community, there's limited foot traffic by the store which has few staff, making that location particularly vulnerable, he said.

“But I don't know whether people who steal trucks, rob pharmacies at gunpoint and then torch vehicles are the type of people that read The Sun Times or other newspapers.”

At least local people will know Flesherton Pharmacy will have a “minimal inventory” of narcotics, he said. Davies said customers who come into the store with prescriptions for a 30-day supply of narcotics may only receive a few days worth, then the rest would be shipped the next day to the store for pickup.

Pharmacies are becoming more likely targets of drug-seeking addicts, said Heather Foley, a pharmacist and adjunct professor at the University of Waterloo's School of Pharmacy, who with the school's help hopes to put together statistics about pharmacy robberies.

Government programs such as the provincial legal requirement for prescribed fentanyl patches to be returned before new ones are issued, and tighter controls over who gets narcotics and how they're monitored, is “great work” but there's a catch, she said.

“If we're doing a better job at getting the medications off the street and out of the hands of criminals, there's only one place left to get it, which is the pharmacist,” she said. “It now creates an even bigger target on the pharmacy.”

Adding to the threat is “the opioid crisis, it's just exploded and it's just so massive too, which is new.”

Foley is president of the Essex County Pharmacists Association. A new self-assessment checklist developed by Windsor police aims to help pharmacists there assess design issues in their stores which would put them at more risk of being in an armed robbery, she said. In Windsor, most pharmacy robberies are done by addicts looking for a quick fix, she said.

Foley hopes to make that strategy, if it's found to be useful and there's broader interest in it, available nationally.

“As healthcare professionals, we have to make our safety paramount in our workplace and making sure we're not targets of robberies. But also how can we be supporting people with addictions and how can we be getting to the real root cause, which is that person with an addiction needing help?”